Portfolio Contents
Your portfolio should be a collection of visual work, professional, experimental, commissioned, and self-initiated, that demonstrates your experience, skills, and passions in the field of design and related disciplines. Of particular interest is work that is personally-driven and challenges norms of conventional professional practice. Our community is built on values of diversity and dexterity in visual communication and scholarship, and we are seeking individuals with great curiosity, creativity, ambition, and depth of commitment. Your portfolio should represent a well-rounded portrait of who you are, where your interests lie, and communicate a strong sense of how you might develop your practice in this program.
Upload up to 20 still images and/or videos (but not only videos) that represent your strongest work, with an emphasis on recent work from the last few years. Please note that the Slate viewer, which the admissions committee uses to assess your work, automatically sequences your work from most recent to oldest. There is not the ability to override this function.
Portfolio Formatting
The portfolio submission interface will prompt you to label each image with a title, date, medium, and a brief description of the work (please do not include your name in the work title or description). Work titles should be limited to 30 characters and descriptions to one concise sentence.
As it’s necessary to review portfolios quickly and at a relatively small scale, we strongly encourage you to present work large within the frame and in a simple and clear manner, so as to maximize our understanding. Generally-speaking, single images with one view of a project work best to achieve this. Split or composite images can make details or complex works difficult to appreciate and may risk being overlooked or misunderstood, so use these only sparingly.
When presenting books or pamphlets, prepare a few representative images that best capture its primary features, or alternatively, make a short video showing a range of spreads. For interactive media, stills are helpful, but we encourage making a short video that captures the user experience. For complex systems-related or identity projects, highlight just the strongest components in a few images, and for three-dimensional works, show the surrounding context so material and scale relationships are clear.
File Sizes and Types
All digital files must adhere strictly to the specifications outlined below. It’s critical that you do not format images in a presentation program (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF). PDFs and presentation program formats are not viewable in our system; only the first page/slide will display. Do not include the title or caption in the image file, as it will decrease the viewable image area.
Media files as large as 5GB are supported, but please be advised that larger files will take longer to upload from your Internet connection and may stall if you are on a wireless connection or one that cannot sustain a connection for the necessary period of time. Uploaded documents (such as transcripts) may contain no more than 75 pages.
The works in your portfolio will display in chronological order by year entered in the image data. This is an embedded feature in the system structure. For example, art #1 made in 2021, art #2 made in 2022, and art #3 made in 2024 will appear in that order. However, if you have multiple pieces created within a single year, you will be able to arrange the artwork in any order within that group of files.
Video files should be no longer than two minutes in length. If you upload a video that is longer than two minutes, it will automatically time out at two minutes. Please note that videos are considered as part of your selection of twenty file uploads and should not be used as a method of showing examples of additional still images. Do not include captions, titles, or credits within the video files.
If you wish to submit longer videos, you may post full video files to your own website and provide the link at the end of your statement. Note, however, that the admissions committee will not be in a position to review works of extensive length.
- Video: .3g2, .3gp, .avi, .m2v, .m4v, .mkv, .mov, .mpeg, .mpg, .mp4, .mxf, .webm, .wmv
- Audio: .aac, .m4a, .mka, .mp3, .oga, .ogg, .wav
- Slide: .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff
Please note that while the Slate application portal lists .gif as an accepted file type, we have found that it does not work well in the system. Please avoid using .gif files.
Résumé
Both the content and design of your résumé are assessed. It should not be longer than 2 pages.
The editor details dialog for this module is now collapsed.
Review Process
At the start of the review process, each application is assigned to a faculty member on the admissions committee to conduct a comprehensive review of all submitted material (portfolio, résumé, statement, recommendations, academic credentials, and TOEFL scores). A second review is then conducted by the entire admissions committee, as well as current graduate students, who view each portfolio projected onto a screen. Thereafter, a selection of applicants are invited for an interview.
As you focus on the pursuit of this opportunity, we wish to emphasize that the Yale School of Art does not operate in a vacuum and is responsive to the strong social, cultural and political currents of this time. The graphic design faculty feel a heightened imperative to embrace inclusivity, diverse ways of making and knowing, and is committed to expanding its pedagogical consciousness and programming to include an array of race, class and gender intersections.
